Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (2 page)

What you need, of course, it’s a dog or cat that
can’t
run. Which, yes, starvation will to some degree satisfy, but most of us carry odd bits of food for the animals. Because we care about them? I don’t think that’s completely it, no. And it’s not a thank you in advance either, not really. It’s more that the animals have conditioned us to feed them. Or—by feeding them just enough to keep them alive, we’re demonstrating that we still have some tether, no matter how bloody, to the old world. To the way it was.

And it would be completely dishonest of me to try to say that all of us don’t hitch the belts around such that our favorite animal is at our dominant hand. The hand we most like to pet with. That connection with a palm-sized skull, a warm body, one dependent upon you, one happy that you’re touching it, it can get you through a whole night of hiding behind a mailbox, if you need it to. Though of course most in that situation will break, will start lobbing pets into the street like mortars, perhaps kissing each on the mouth before slinging it up into the sky. And then others, of course, after expending half their belt, will slide to their knees on the asphalt, unbuckle, and release their dogs and cats, try to shoo them away before the horde overwhelms them. If you want to live, however, then you’ll empty belt after belt behind you.

There’s even legend of a tall man, our progenitor perhaps, who wears bandoliers across his chest, a suckling kitten thumbed into each cartridge space, a bottle of milk in his pocket to keep them alive.

And, yes, with the cats at least, you can sling them by the tail before release if you want—the sound they make is perfect—but you have to time it just right, so the cat sails over the horde’s heads, and you also have to never reconsider, never stop swinging, because that’s a cat you’ll never reholster. What’s sad is to have somebody return from a scavenging mission unscathed by the dead but with their eye clawed out, soon to be infected. We don’t have enough people for those kinds of mistakes.

As for the animals—is this not why we domesticated them? For companionship in times of leisure, sure, but, in times like this, to serve us, to help us survive. They die fully aware of what their sacrifice means, are proud to be allowing us another few feet of life.

However, there are of course lines.

The second day of the plague, when it spilled down from the airport, infected downtown, my neighbor’s nine-year-old son attempted to mask his scent with the gore of a decapitated zombie. A fully effective measure, provided you have the nerve, the stomach—he had both—but you don’t want to let that gore come into contact with your tear ducts, or any cuts you might have.

Things progressed in the predictable way after that, until my neighbor took the easy way out: siphoned the gas from his car, lawnmower, and weedeater, and set fire to himself and his son. Valiant, perhaps, but irresponsible as well. He didn’t take into account the acetylene torch in his garage.

When the flames spread there, as flames will, the resulting explosion caved in the wall of
my
son’s bedroom, crushing his right leg while he slept. Luckily it’s a closed break, no bone coming through the skin, but of course pushing him around in a wheelchair or shopping cart, even strapped to a dolly or pulled in a make-do rickshaw, that’s no way to beat a hasty retreat. And this is the age of hasty retreats.

Luckily for
me
, though, he’s small for his age—six—so I’ve been able to fashion a quiver of sorts for him to ride in. He sits backwards, of course, to better see (and warn me about) our constant pursuers, and, all in all, it’s not bad. I always know where he is, and, as for him, he’s named the animals I wear around my belt. There’s Axel and Win and Lobby and General Tough and Red Eye and, after his mother, Sidney.

And so we scavenge, have the various skirmishes that are unavoidable, until it comes to pass that, running ahead of some twelve or fifteen zombies one afternoon, I have to wrench the belt around, jerk sideways on Sidney, and, my son reaching for her the whole time, like he wants us to die here, I lob her behind us. Which is, I suppose, where my son’s rear view is perhaps not as ideal as it usually is: he has to watch the lead zombie lower its mouth to the cat he named, suckle it dry. But there’s nothing for it.

My legs are burning, my feet pounding, my front backpack lined with canned goods, and the sounds of our pursuers are more distant now, my son slack in his quiver like I’ve taught him, so as to preserve my balance. At least until a chance zombie, one of the fast ones, breaks from whatever it had been feeding on in a doorway. And of course Sidney was our last animal.

Now
it’s a race, the kind where I’m pawing, trying to be sure I really have saved one round in my left-hand pistol. The way I picture it is I’ll find a corner up ahead, round it, slide to a stop, swing my son around and pull his forehead to mine, hold us together like that. If I do it right, if the slug’s got enough powder behind it, I can end us both with one shot. And if not, he’ll be first, anyway, and I’ll be covered in him, and we’ll have done everything we can do.

Except I’m wrong.

There is one more thing to do, as it turns out. One last line to cross.

While I’m looking for our corner, my son pulls his release strap, launches himself down in my backpack, his bad leg crunching under him, and, with his weight gone, I fall forward, skid on my palms, roll over just in time to see the new lead zombie almost to him.

“
No!”
I yell, reaching with my left hand, with the pistol, but my shot goes wild, and my son, he looks back to me then, and is so calm, so serene, so happy to be doing this for me that it would be a travesty for me not to stand, run, keep living. For him, always for him.

MY HERO

Vigilante Man woke with a start: someone needed him. He grinned and straightened his mask, pushed off from the foot of his bed to the open window, his cape sweeping behind him. Below, the lights of the city shimmered in the heat. A siren wailed, a dog howled, a movie-bound couple skirted the dark corner of a street only to walk into the headlights of a delivery van. You can’t save them all. Vigilante Man had learned this long ago. You can’t save them from themselves.

He leaned forward onto the sill, tilting his head for the voice that had called his name, trying to separate it from the gunshots and screeching tires and for a moment he heard it—a whimpering, a last breath, of someone cornered and alone, not knowing who else to call, what other name to say—but then a gloved hand muffled it. It had been coming from the bowery, though. Always the bowery.

Elastic Man’s stomping ground.

It would be so easy to let him handle it.

But what if it was the Exacerbator again?

Vigilante Man shook his head no, please, and looked to the phone on his nightstand. All it would take would be one call to see if the hospital had been broken into again, or out of. If the Exacerbator were free to wreak his special brand of havoc, bring the city to its knees. Last time had almost been too much, and the time before, and the time before. And Captain Impossible had even been around then.

Vigilante Man closed his eyes behind his mask, lowered his head. He was so tired. The closet behind him was filled with the carefully folded clothes of his alter-ego Evan Boanerges, ace accountant, and nights like these it would be so easy to slip into the white undershirt and faded boxers, wait for the alarm to wake him, then ride the bus to work. But then a paper would blow up against his trouser leg on the way into the office and he’d see the crime, the decay, the rampant destruction, and he’d look to the sky like everyone else. And what if that was Sherry down there anyway, backed into a corner of the bowery not even Elastic Man could squeeze into?

Vigilante Man clutched his cape—kevlar, because not all superheroes are bulletproof—and raised one leg to the sill then thought better of it, took Evan Boanerges’ keys instead, locking the apartment door behind him, riding the elevator down with an old woman holding her dog. The dog growled at him. He stared straight forward at the row of buttons.

There was no theme music as Evan Boanerges entered the office the next morning, the pocket of his shirt lined with pencils like he was an engineer. It was part of the disguise.

His cubicle was third from the left, by the window. The special compartment of his briefcase held this month’s issue of
Rescue Beaver
, the comic he liked to quietly make fun of during the lull before lunch when he made himself take a break from his projects, so he wouldn’t get too far ahead of his coworkers. He didn’t want to make them look bad. It wasn’t their fault they needed calculators and deodorant.

In the false bottom of the drawer devoted to the last five years’ tax codes was a back-up mask, just in case. His old one, with the elastic strap that always took a wad of hair with it.

At nine o’clock Boy Plunder showed up, the new temp. He had hidden pockets all over his body, shaped like staplers and hole-punches and tape dispensers. Evan Boanerges stared at him and Boy Plunder stared back. If he only knew.

Evan Boanerges crunched numbers for an hour, and then hunched over
Rescue Beaver
before it was really time: Sherry wasn’t here yet, and she hadn’t called in. Evan flipped through the pages humorlessly, Rescue Beaver’s trademark taunts and obligatory tail-slaps suddenly banal and crude, his mask a mockery of heroism.

In the break room all the talk was about Morton in Special Accounts. Vanessa from Human Resources had seen his last health insurance claim, and he had some syndrome: Ehlers-Danlos. She said it with a question mark and a whisper and then looked to Evan. Evan pretended to be carefully preparing his coffee, though. The glass door at the front of the Hawkins & Daniels suite opened but it still wasn’t Sherry.

Where was she?

Three cubicles over, Boy Plunder pocketed an electric pencil sharpener, his back to the office, his reflection caught in the observation window which looked out onto the whole city. The window was why Evan had turned down other jobs, better offers. Up here he was a guardian.

He held his steaming coffee to his lips and turned his back on Vanessa, but then Mr. Sharpes’ wide frame filled the door and everybody’s backs straightened.

His eyes were gleaming with managerial fury, the fist of his right hand clenching and unclenching.

Evan avoided eye contact, because, even in this suit, with this bearing, this posture, still, there was something of the carriage of Vigilante Man there. Of rights to be wronged; of duty. Everything he stood for, Mr. Sharpes stood against, and for a moment Evan saw in his boss—from the knees down, at least—a similarly hidden identity, and then followed the three piece up to the leering grin, the bald head. Mr. Sharpes ran his hand through the hair he didn’t have, told Vanessa to continue, not to stop on his account.

Vanessa swallowed and explained: Ehlers-Danlos syndrome simply meant you had too much collagen in your skin and bones. In extreme cases it could make a person rubbery. People with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome didn’t
break
their bones, they
bent
them.

Evan winced, grimaced, grinned displeasure. He had known about Morton Collander’s secret identity for months already. It was obvious: what kind of a name was Collander, anyway? But he was young, unlearned. Still slugging it out in the bowery every night, like one hero could ever make a difference there. Evan envied him his youth, though. How he always bounced back.

“It’s nothing,” he assured Vanessa, his coffee sloshing over the foam lip of his cup, onto his fingers. He pretended it hurt so they wouldn’t suspect him as well. So they wouldn’t find anything suspicious in
his
file.

Mr. Sharpes laughed.

It was his first time back in the office since his vacation. He had a tan six weeks deep.

“Saw your girl last night,” he said, shifting the attention to Evan.

“My . . . my
girl
?” Evan asked, no eye contact.

Mr. Sharpes grinned: he was back all right. Stronger than ever.

“You know the one,” he said, tracing her shape in the air like he’d actually
felt
it, “Sherry. The venerable Ms. Tombs.”

Evan’s cup exploded all over the front of his white shirt, and Vanessa laughed, and her friend laughed, and Mr. Sharpes shook his head and walked around the mess to the refrigerator.

For the days when Captain Impossible had been on patrol.

When Evan returned to his cubicle Boy Plunder was up to his armpits in a drawer.

“Lose something?” Evan asked, a Rescue Beaver line.

Boy Plunder smiled, nodded to Evan’s pants.

“Wet yourself, boss?” he said, and in the instant Evan looked down—something Vigilante Man never would have done, as his tights were stain resistant, designed to wick even the slightest hint of moisture away—in the instant Evan looked down, Boy Plunder lowered his face to his waiting hand.

When he looked up he was wearing the old mask. The hair-pulling mask.

“No,” Evan said, “don’t, you can’t, my secret ident—” but Boy Plunder was already up and over the side of the cubicle and running down the walkway throwing papers behind him.

Vigilante Man gave chase as Evan Boanerges, running only as fast as a non-heroic man could run in restrictive slacks and slick-soled shoes. He had to catch him, though. They flashed past the break room, the copy machine, and in the bend between the receptionist desk and the waiting room where no one had a clear view, Vigilante Man turned on the speed, sent Evan Boanerges airborne, so that he was able to hug his arms around Boy Plunder’s thighs. They crashed to the tile floor together, sliding on the elbows of Evan Boanerges’ suit to the front door and against it, even as it opened on the legs and feet and calves and person of Sherry Tombs. Her coffee was dripping from the hem of her skirt. She whimpered in a way Evan knew.

“You, you . . .” she said, Boy Plunder peering up at her through the eyes of the mask, and then held her clean hand over her lip, trying to stifle a laugh. “Evan,” she managed to say at last, trying to help him up, Boy Plunder slipping out the door with contraband staplers and three-ring binders, “Evan, you saved me”—still not laughing—“again,” and even though there were real tears in her eyes of some kind, Vigilante Man knew better.